this is my very first “artwork”.
I have spend time on several different aspects to try to step up a bit my knowledge of blender, applying what I learned from tutorials and hints from this forum.
I modeled, created geo-nodes, cloth simluated almost anything except for minor kit-bashed elements and the zombie in the ground…
This is the real sight from my studio room, where I work from, re-visited after The Walking dead watch: I was thinking about how those two buildinds may be connected to stay safe and not to go in the streets.
I imagined how could this sight change if we were in a zombieland and shot with an iPhone camera. that’s why I tried to keep anything as more “realistic” as possible (compared to my poor skills).
the only change have been made have been to the number of floors, in order to let the view see the ground.
No post-pro have been made, for the same reason of above.
I would love to receive all the critics and comments to improve this first work to go improve and go ahead.
Thank you very much in advance for your time, in the case you want to stop here.
For a first official artwork, that’s pretty good already!
One thing I can suggest immediately: the brick wall in the foreground looks like it has been cleanly sliced with some sort of precision tool. In real life, brick would break apart more like this:
Entire bricks will fall and go missing rather than get sliced in half.
Some of the bricks will likely get individually damaged too, but they will chip and fracture in a jagged way instead of looking sliced. Also, in case of hollow blocks like in your picture, it’s likely that each wall of the brick would be broken differently from each other by the various hits that took down the wall.
Personnally, I would do the bricks manually. Something that is this close to the camera deserves that kind of attention. Geo nodes for bricks is worth using if you are going to make a lot of brick, but they just make thing more complicated for detail work.
I would assemble the wall manually by modelling a single brick and duplicating it. Then, make the hole simply by deleting some of the bricks. The remaining bricks can be damaged and chipped by manually placing rock meshes into the bricks and using the boolean tool in edit mode to carve them in.
I think it could use more contrast, really bring out the lighter orange windows and deepen the blue shadows. A vignette would help focus the composition as well
The first thing I notice that needs some work is the lighting. I’m not sure what kind of light setup you’re using, whether it’s blender lights or HDRIs or something else, but the image looks a bit flat. What you could try is disable the outside light you’re using, add a sun to your scene with a blue-ish tint and not too bright and play around with the direction it’s coming from. This plays a big part in how your scene will look. Right now there aren’t any contrasted shadows and it’s not easy to see where the light is coming from, so i’d play around with that.
The corners of the buildings are very sharp. They could use a little bit of bevel and maybe some slight damage and chipping.
The character is a bit dark, maybe some lighting could be used to bring more attention on them? Maybe try a subtle rim light to separate the character from the background more.
I would expect the bottom section of the buildings to be a little dirty, especially where they join with the ground. Also, if zombies are being shot next to them, that would probably splatter the walls a little (if you are fine with taking the image in that direction), this could also help bring some attention to the zombies, as they are a little hard to notice at first glance.
regarding the lighiting i have been struggled a bit to decide what kind of illumination to set up.
I wanted to keep it as more realistic as possible, therefore I used Dynamic SKy with bluish tint, background clouds orienting like it was midnight.
I DO agree is quite anonimous with this lighting, but it’s quite like real life here in rome… I have been in de Jordan desert 3 days ago and the full moon was lighing that way… flat…
i used nodes for a lamp to create subtle clouds shadows on the buildnig but as I see… they are too subtle…
either didn’t want to crank up the contrast as I wanted to be like an iPhone real shot…
but I felt the same sense of un-complete like you
BEVELED the corners… but maybe I have been too much attached to realism as… you couldn’t see them
will think about it: ty @etn249 for precious comments… yesterday added grass to the base of the building for the same purpose than you and totally forgot to add some dirt…
There is the reality and how it’s reinterpreted in entertainement. A realistic lighting is quite boring in general. Even if an image seem to have a natural lighting a lot of work is generally done to make the image more interesting and also more readable.
On the overall the image is really cool especially for some first work. And there are good ideas on the way you’ve bring it together.
Indeed playing with the lights and material colors could help to balance the image a bit more without adding a lot of extra-work.
Actually the building draw a lot of attention where we should be first focused on the sniper and the zombie. The later sadly being really easy to miss visually…
By tweaking the light and the material colors you can draw more attention to these. Most important questions are “what the image is about ?”, “What draws away the attention from that ?” and “how to make it more clear ?” .
There are low hanging fruits and of course more involved tasks to make things better.
You can make the sniper gun point at the zombie, add a splat of bood on the wall near the zombie, and maybe some people looking at the scene ( the zombie again), and also pay attention to contrast : having him brighter over a dark background, or the opposite will again help to make it more visible. Value wise the zombie is very close to the ground.
In general you want to increase contrast where there is important things and reduce it near parts less important.
But afterall, these tricks you’ll get better at them from project to projects. Since a lot of things are already working , it’s mostly these kind of details that will make things work even better !
Well done and I’m looking forward your next piece !
you know what?
I believe the most important aspect missing is that I cannot actually reply to this:
what the image is about
since this all started by night toughts, before falling asleep, after watching The Walking Dead.
I was asking myself, what would I do to connect my condo and the front one?
That’s why I cannot choose nor give the right light to drive attention…
I have not clear in mind that aspect!
TY VM for all these:
There is the reality and how it’s reinterpreted in entertainement. A realistic lighting is quite boring in general. Even if an image seem to have a natural lighting a lot of work is generally done to make the image more interesting and also more readable.
I will think about that deeper and gonna look for some good example of night scenes
Is this meant to be a night scene? If it is, then I can help.
Right now, it looks like a cloudy day or maybe the time right after sunset, when there still is a little bit of light. If you want to make a scene that really tells the viewer it’s night time, you need to have a contrast between areas of light and dark. This means that there will be very little or no light from the sky and almost everything is done with light sources placed inside the scene.
At night, there are some zones of bright light near light sources and the rest is almost perfectly dark. The light usually comes from small sources instead of a soft sky light, so there will be lots of harsh shadows stretching across walls and floors. Also, the lighting can have colors that are not part of daylight, like the orange glow of fire or colorful city lights. You can go as bright as you want on the lights, but as long as some parts of the image are in the dark, the illusion of night will be maintained.
Because everything is lit from light sources, there will be objects lit from behind or from the sides. This can be used to your advantage, to create rim lighting that makes the shape of objects easy to see over the background.
You can use these zones of light and darkness to focus the viewer’s eye on what’s important. You can make important areas brighter than the rest and maybe also separate parts of the scene with different light colors.
If I had to relight your scene as pure night time, here is what I would try:
First reduce the sky light to almost nothing. Also, I would desaturate its color, night skies are rarely that blue, especially in cities.
Then, I would add a bright spot light coming from the top left and shining towards the street from behind the character. Maybe it’s a search light the survivors put on a roof top to see the street. This light would make the character’s silhouette well visible, make the bridge cast an interesting shadow all across the building’s wall and give the picture a sense of direction between the character and the street. That spot light could also be made with an IES texture for more interest (the beams and rings patterns that appear in certain artificial lamps).
If necessary, there could be smaller spot lights or other sources illuminating the zombies and drawing attention to them.
If there is moonlight, I would give it an angle that leaves deep shadows inside the street. Also, make sure it’s not blue: despite what many people would think, moonlight’s color should be slightly yellow like sunlight, just much weaker.
Yes , it’s part of the creative process, you don’t have all the elements right in the beginning , especially in personal work.
But, basically taking the result you have now, there is only a few possibilities there, unless you do radical changes.
You have to decide how close you want to be to your actual location. If it’s primary targeted at your close friends then probably this accuracy is top priority. If not, you can probably enhance the reality with whatever the image asks for. This basically dictates how important the environment is going to be and if it should be the first read or not.
Then, basically the story / what the image is about is already there, at least to us it’s a regular zombie / post apocalyptic image. You can put more story elements if you like, or keep it like that.
But in general it’s best to keep elements number low. Just like if you want to tell what you did yesterday, it’s best to talk about only a few but most interesting things. Here a sniper stopping a zombie in a post apocalyptic world is already great, of course then it goes down to how great you can describe that story moment : very clearly/precisely and with evocative/strong details…
A good way of sorting things in this image could be that we first look at the sniper (it’s already more or less the case, even if the building draws a lot of attention) , then the zombie , and once the viewer get that “zombie apocalypse” universe, it’s possible to wander a bit more in the image and look at the environment, especially the building as a “third read”.
Once that order is well defined, you can start to ask yourself what helps the viewer to see things in that order, and what drives us away from that. Obviously these things you’ll get better at them by growing as an artist with time and practice.
so, sir, this is the starting step…
consider before reading your tips, I already was moving in the directions you were about to give!
now the matter is working on relevant lights to focus on areas of interest forgetting the hyper-realism concept at the beginning
there was also some ground fog not showing I shall tweak!
